Soviets Open Prisons and Records To Inquiry on Wallenberg's Fate

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The Soviet Union has agreed for the first time to open prisons and archives to an international commission investigating the fate of Raoul Wallenberg, the Swedish diplomat who disappeared into the Soviet prison system after saving thousands of Jews from the Nazis, members of the commission said today.

The investigators said the promise of collaboration by Soviet agencies - including the K.G.B., whose files are considered the richest potential source of information - offered the best chance to date of proving or disproving the Soviet assertion that Mr. Wallenberg died in 1947.

But some members of the commission said they were skeptical about the promise of full disclosure. The group's first request to the K.G.B., for files of the now-defunct counterintelligence agency that arrested Mr. Wallenberg in January 1945, met with a noncommittal response.

Unusual Collaboration

The new investigation is extraordinary in that the collaborators include not only Soviet law enforcement and intelligence agencies, but former political prisoners, a representative of Moscow's Jews, and a specialist from Memorial, a Soviet anti-Stalinist society.

Irwin Cotler, a Canadian lawyer long involved in Soviet human rights issues, said the new investigation had been modeled on the work of an international commission that led to the official Soviet admission of the massacre of Polish soldiers in the Katyn forest in World War II.

''The Soviets have said they will not insist on their position that Raoul Wallenberg died in 1947, but will allow for an open-ended investigation,'' Mr. Cotler said. ''And they have promised to make all the evidence available. In our discussions, they acknowledged that their own previous inquiries had been superficial.''

Visit to Prison Planned

The commission was to begin this week with a visit to Vladimir prison, where numerous inmates reported seeing Mr. Wallenberg in the decades after the date Soviet officials have long given for his death. The investigators include two former political prisoners, now emigres, who served time in that prison.

They are Cronid Lubarsky, who runs a human rights information service in Munich, West Germany, and Marvin Makinen, chairman of the biochemistry department at the University of Chicago.

As an amateur Swedish diplomat in wartime Budapest, Mr. Wallenberg rescued thousands of Hungarian Jews from the gas chambers by feats of boldness and ingenuity.

He sheltered Jews in protective houses flying the neutral Swedish flag, pulled prisoners from death trains, and forged Swedish work documents for condemned Jews.

He vanished into Stalin's prison system after the Red Army rolled into Nazi-occupied Budapest. There was no official word of his fate until 1957, when repeated queries from the Swedish Government resulted in a statement that Mr. Wallenberg had died, at the age of 35, of a heart attack in Lubyanka prison in Moscow.

Last year, after insisting for decades that all documents in the case had disappeared, Soviet authorities produced Mr. Wallenberg's passport and personal effects, but stuck to the original version of his death.

'Compelling' Evidence

An international commission of inquiry that operated with limited Soviet cooperation concluded last May that there was ''compelling'' evidence Mr. Wallenberg was alive in the 1950's and 1960's, and ''credible'' evidence that he was still alive into the 1980's.

Mr. Cotler, who was chairman of that earlier investigation, said the last reported sightings were by two independent witnesses who said they had evidence that Mr. Wallenberg was in a prison between Moscow and Leningrad in November 1987. Andrei D. Sakharov, the human rights campaigner, attempted to pursue the reports without success.

Aleksei Kartsev, who has been investigating the Wallenberg case for the Soviet daily Komsomolskaya Pravda, said that in the past year the authorities have allowed him to visit Vladimir prison and examine records there, but that many documents seemed to be missing.

Better Answers Sought

''We have been given answers to almost every one of our questions,'' said Mr. Kartsev, who is working with the new investigation. ''But the quality of the answers has not always been satisfactory.''

For example, the authorities have so far refused to make available the files of Smersh, the military counterintelligence agency that arrested Mr. Wallenberg. Mr. Cotler said the commission requested that material this morning.

''The answer was, they will pass the request to those who are responsible for those archives,'' Mr. Cotler said.

''I'm doubtful that the K.G.B. will give us the documents quickly,'' Mr. Kartsev said. ''But this is a process of water wearing away stone.''

A version of this article appears in print on , Section A, Page 2 of the National edition with the headline: Soviets Open Prisons and Records To Inquiry on Wallenberg's Fate. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe